In House Editorial Reviews

[ClaytonKendall]

We were looking to write reviews in house for some of our top products. We feel as though we know the products very well, and are willing to give accurate, honest reviews to our customers to help them choose the best products for them.  We would also be very happy if any SEO benefits came from this. My question is, does anyone have experience doing this and if so, is there a magic number to write that would make Google take notice to these changes? Thanks in advance for any help!

[evacuumstoreSEO]

Your best practice for in house reviews, although I cannot say it is the most ethical, would be to create customer accounts and write reviews on the products. Make sure to spread these out over time with different usernames. As far as google goes, if they're all coming from the same IP address, they might not be so helpful but using the keywords anywhere on your page in text is always good!

When customers see these good reviews they will feel better about making a purchase and that helps conversions(which is the reason you're doing SEO in the first place).

Another way to do in house reviews is to do them on the company blog. This is a more white-hat approach and you can link to other pages on your site where the products are.

The best way to help your page though is to ask your customers to write reviews. Offer them incentives(like a 5% discount on their next purchase when they review the product they bought).

Having real reviews on your site is definitely a great way to give your site a better reputation. Hope that helps!

[ClaytonKendall]

Thanks for the insight Tyler, but we have explored a lot of options for customer reviews and plan on using this as one technique, not our only source of reviews. Also, we are not going to take any unethical actions. We plan on stating clearly that it is an editorial review and give our honest opinion of products. Would a lack of variety in IP address really be a concern if we take an honest approach, and provide unique content detailing why the products are good or bad? My question is, how will this help with our SEO and is their an estimate of reviews it would take to see any results? Thanks again for your help!

[evacuumstoreSEO]

Sorry I guess I misunderstood you! This sounds like a good technique and the IP address variety will not be a problem. Doing just one of these will be helpful for you as long as it is original content and you use the keyword properly. There is really no definite number of these that it will take to see a significant result but having any new original content will help your google rankings. Google likes to see original fresh content so as long as it's original, these will be helpful!